Tyra Banks Is Fat One

Tyra Banks Is Fat

One of the things I find most interesting about the article "Tyra Banks Is Fat": Reading

(Post-)Racism and (Post-) Feminism in the New Millennium by Ralina L. Joseph (2009), is that the author manages to bring in the element of racism into a female body issue. Of course it is useless to attempt denying the clearly negative overtones of the "Tyra Banks is Fat" debacle, I believe that the author is grasping outside of the issues at hand when analyzing this phrase beyond the issue of feminine body image.

The article appears to make a claim towards the overtly racist when analyzing the claim that Tyra Banks is fat. To my mind, the issue is much more straight forward: Tyra banks, a former model, has gained weight. What this means is that her image in the public view has changed from that of super model to "normal" person. I do not think that race has any part to play in this. Instead, the author might have place greater emphasis on the fantasy element. Tyra Banks is the image of successful womanhood in several arenas: the "girl next door," the fantasy of the perfectly proportioned body, and the successful media mogul. These fantasies might be said not only to be desirable by men, but also coveted by women. In this, as the article rightly states, portrays Banks as the successful image of the "everywoman." How the author manages to make the leap from "everywoman" to racially informed appears to be a bit of a mystery.

The focus on Banks's own focus on racial paradigms in her reality show is much more legitimate, in my view. The show, "America's Next Top Model," Banks appears to focus on paradigms that are considered "appropriate" for specific racial or gender paradigms. However, even in this sense, one might consider these as paradigms that are commonly considered appropriate for the modelling profession rather than for society in general.

This, in my view, is an issue that is separate from the commonly social paradigms of racism or sexism. The central concept of modelling is to create not so much an idealized female form as it is to make this form as thin and flat as possible. Far beyond the "ideal" female form in the minds of many, modelling creates a paradigm not only of impossible perfectionism in terms of face and posture, but also in terms of size. As such, modelling is not about being "sexy," but rather about the common misconception that thin is also necessarily beautiful. This tends to be a female-focused paradigm rather than a sexist one, where one might define sexism as a male-imposed paradigm upon the female body.

In this light, I do not believe that the "Tyra Banks is Fat" scandal is so much racially or even sexism-informed as it is informed by the generally human paradigm of enjoying the flaws in a person who was previously assumed to be "perfect." Models are envied, mostly by women, for their lack of body fat. This is an ideal that women tend to strive for, generally encouraged by media images of the "perfect" physique. To see a person from these ranks finally backslide into the ranks of "normal" women could be said to provide some measure of satisfaction. Indeed, perhaps it is even a good thing, demystifying the mystical ideal of the perfectly beautiful and the perfectly thing into something that human endeavor, rather than natural giftedness, has accomplished.